“Sure.”
She shuts the thing with her foot, and goes over to smoke by her open window. As usual, she solves the ashtray issue with Coca-Cola, which she drinks all the time. Leaving two inches in the bottom of the plastic bottles does the ticket, her butts drowning in sugar and carbonated caffeine.
“You got Crenshaw for geometry?” she asks.
I look at my textbook. “Yes, I do.”
“She’s a pushover. My friend had her last year. I got Thomas.”
I feel compelled to offer an opinion on Mr. Thomas. “I’ve heard he’s good, though.”
“Her. It’s Ms. Thomas.”
I flush and go quiet. As we sit in silence, I try to think of something, anything that would be normal to say.
“You gotta meet some people, Taylor,” Strots tells me. “You gotta get out more.”
An image of the dining hall comes to mind, and my memory of the two hundred girls in there, all of them talking at once, eating, drinking, scraping their chairs back and their trays off, is an electrical shock down my spinal cord.
“I’d ask you to sit you with me, but we don’t have room,” Strots says like she’s reading my mind. “They don’t let us pull chairs.”
This is not true. I’ve seen other tables that have a Saturn’s ring of seats around the core. Greta’s is one. But I appreciate Strots trying not to hurt my feelings, and have a sense that she feels as though I am a responsibility of hers that she wouldn’t have chosen, but will not shirk.
“It’s okay,” I say.
“You don’t talk much.”
“I don’t have much to say.” I look back at her. “I’m sorry.”
“Doesn’t bother me.” She taps her ash into the soda bottle. “You need friends, though.”
“Greta and the two brunettes?” I say in a wry tone.
Strots laughs. “Oh, my God, like it’s a band and they’re the backup singers. That’s fucking perfect.”
The idea Strots has found something I’ve said funny makes me tingle with happiness, and I realize I want to be my roommate not because she’s sporty. I want to be Greta not because she’s popular or pretty. I just want to be something, anything, as opposed to in the “other” category I inhabit. I want a full table of people who are from the same dye lot as myself, whose voices I recognize, whose ears want to hear what I have to say, whose eyes seek out mine to acknowledge inside jokes.
There’s no one in my orbit for sure, and there’s another reason I keep my mouth closed. I have a secret I’m ashamed of, and pride is the only thing that the poor have plenty of in their wallets and their cupboards, and I am destitute not just from a money standpoint, I am poor all over, in all ways, I am Tiny Tim, I am disabled by a fireplace, hungry at Christmas, begging for—
I stop my thoughts as a cold rush hits the top of my head.
It’s too late. My mind coughs up countless Tiny Tim images, Tiny Tim syllables, a deluge of the spines of Dickens novels along with that old movie my mother made me watch on the TV with turkey meat TV dinners—
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I take a deep breath and do what Dr. Warten taught me to do. I label this behavior. This is a prodromal symptom I must rein in. I am not Tiny Tim. I am not Charles Dickens. I am not a starving, peg-legged child on a stool before a crackling fire, with an empty belly, dirty clothes, a smudge of soot on my too-lean, baby boy face—
My heart begins to pound. My mouth goes dry. I find it interesting that I can be on such a precipice and yet my roommate is calmly easing back against the wall on her bed, cracking open a book, taking out a notebook and a blue Bic pen—
It’s a Bic. Just like her lighter. A Bic. Two Bics.
Lighter and pen. A lighter pen. AlighterpenBic. Bic, Bic, Bic… two Bics, a Bic, a Bic, a BicaBicaBic—
I jump to my feet and knock my chair over. On her bed, Strots looks up in surprise. I turn to reassure her, but cannot hear what I say to her or what she says back to me. Her lips are moving, and so are mine, but I cannot—
—BicBicBic. Red. Blue. RedBlue. Pen.Pen.Lighterlighterbluered—
* * *
The next thing I know, I am in the shower, standing under cold water. I have no idea how I got here. I’m naked, so I clearly had enough presence of mind to remove my clothes somewhere along the way—please, God, not outside my room, in the hallway—and my teeth are chattering. My arms are locked under my unremarkable, ant-mound breasts, and my fake-black hair has rivered down onto my collarbones, forming oil streaks on top of my pale skin…
I lose my grasp on those thoughts. Whatever they were.
Taking a deep breath, I close my eyes and concentrate more on what my lungs are doing. In and out. In and out. I ride as best I can the tremors of the currently receding cognitive earthquake, those hoppity-skippity-thought-ities that will take me back down the road I do not want to go down again, down, again, downagain—
More breathing, as I fight the filaments of madness that are attaching to me and trying to pull me through the reality fence into a playground with sharp knives and sandpaper, broken glass and rusty nails.
Desperate to save myself, I picture Strots sitting on her bed in our room, blowing smoke in the direction of the open window, her bare legs crossed, her other hand holding the pack of cigarettes and the lighter on one of her knees. I see the new bruise on her shin from field hockey practice. I see the scrape on the outside of her thigh. I see the raw patch on her elbow.
This is what does it. The image of my roommate, with all its accurate, short-term memory details, is what unplugs the electrical current.
As I land more solidly back in my body, this is the most important reason I don’t talk much: It takes so much effort to keep myself connected to reality that I don’t have much left over for casual conversation. I am in a perpetual inner loop, my mental illness a centrifuge that tries to draw me into myself, the outside world and other people a Polo to my Marco that in best-case scenarios can bring me back.
As long as I am measuring my environment and the people in it, I am a tethered air balloon.
And it has worked again. This time.
As my physical awareness resurges, the temperature of the spray becomes painful and I shiver. I reach behind and fumble with the faucet’s single handle, cranking it all the way up to the H, after which I regulate things so I’m comfortable. I’m relieved that there seems to be no one else in the bathroom. I hear no voices in the larger space and the girls here are incapable of going anywhere singly or in silence, their endless expulsion of syllables part of their respiratory function. There are also no fruity, flowery smells emanating from the showers on either side of me, no toilets flushing with a choked gasp, no minty fresh goings-on at the sinks.
I dread what Strots thinks of me right now and I hope no one else witnessed my shambled trip in here. I’m also surprised to find that I remembered to get my shampoo and soap from my cubby and bring them with me. They’re at my feet on the tile, loners in a wet desert. Unlike the other girls, I don’t have a red bucket with a handle to keep corralled bottles of Herbal Essences along with razors, moisturizers, and the ubiquitous Clinique facial soap that comes in those pale green plastic-train-tunnel containers.